I cut my hair pretty short for the first time in a decade at the beginning of July this year. I’m sick of it already, but I did get a nice thank you card from the folks at Locks of Love after donating. And here’s a picture of the thank you note AND the donation itself to prove it.

So, stay tuned.

However, the tendonitis suddenly became very severe a few months ago and is now accompanied by numbness and tingling that are certainly more annoying than the pain. The irony is that these “sudden” RSI symptoms started and worsened when I had actually reduced my work hours (only 40 hours per week!)– like most departments at Stanford do for significant cost savings, my office closes for a few weeks at the end of the year and aside from taking the long break (and even managing to avoid doing work despite being on-call), I even left for the break a week early. Since then, I’ve been out of the office more than usual due to illness (it’s largely a crapshoot everyday how I’ll be feeling) and a slightly ridiculous number of doctor and physical therapy appointments. I’m pretty sure I’m being punished for a life of playing piano and typing.

As of now, almost all of my test results are normal and one thing we’re pretty sure about is that it’s NOT lupus. So, for the most part, we’ve managed to rule out a number of things and otherwise, we’re back to the drawing board and I just need to suck it up while we figure things out. At the end of the day, I having basically decided that if I was a superhero, my powers would be tolerance of prescription drugs and the ability to stay relatively high-functioning despite constant pain.

In any case, I’m slowly starting to improve and get back to a somewhat normal life, including maintaining my offline social life and my online presence. Look forward to more frequent posting soon.

When you have an LP (as you may also have heard it called, especially on something like House), there’s a 10-15% chance that you’ll get a severe headache with nausea, but that can usually be avoided by making sure you stay lying flat on your back for a few hours after the procedure and keeping your fluids up. A persistent headache can mean that a proper clot didn’t form at the puncture site and there’s a CSF (cerebrospinal fluid) leak– a microscopic leak, not one that comes oozing out your back, so the headache is the only real tip off that you have one.

Amazingly, after staying strictly in the supine position after the procedure at the doctor’s office and then at home (except for the brief trip to the car in a wheelchair and all and then up the elevator home), I avoided getting a severe headache and hopefully, a CSF leak. Imagine my luck, considering I otherwise have a headache everyday, often all day.

Anyway, thanks to Marina and Charles for taking me to the doctor and taking care of me all day yesterday. For the less squeamish, check out this video of an actual LP.

However, the most interesting thing I learned about was the site myfreeimplants.com. Cosmetic surgery financing at its finest, the site basically pairs up women who want to get breast implants with men who are willing to “donate” money to their cause.

Only in America. You’ve got to love a free market.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to next week’s episode My Big Breasts and Me.

After reading about hiccups in Wikipedia, I probably know more than I should ever know about hiccups, but here are a few interesting tidbits:

• In 1988, Francis Fesmire of the University of Tennessee College of Medicine published his research on “Termination of intractable hiccups with digital rectal massage.” In 2006, he was one of the recipients of the Ig Nobel for medicine for his research. Aside from being “research that makes people laugh and then think,” as the Ig Nobel folks say, the additional interesting thing about this is that there’s an episode of House where a patient who claims to be suffering from hiccups, after being told they will go away on their own, requests a specific treatment/cure that he read about, one that some guy one a prize for. Later, House throws the patient’s file on the counter, telling the nurse to make a note about “drug-seeking behavior.” Dr. Cuddy asks, “Morphine?” House answers, “No, anal-digital stimulation.”
• As recounted by my friend during our hiccups discussion, Charles Osborne, after slaughtering or weighing a hog (I’ve found conflicting reports on what he was actually doing, but it definitely involved a hog), suffered from hiccups continuously for 68 years, from 1922 to 1990. (He obviously holds the Guinness World Record for “Longest Attack of Hiccups.”) Contrary to what we thought earlier– that he had hiccups all the way until his death– his hiccups actually mysteriously disappeared on their own in 1990, a year before he passed away. Nevertheless, he still managed to live to the ripe old age of 97, marrying at least more than once and fathering several children.

Check out this interview of a girl who had hiccups for five weeks (the video shows her after about three weeks in):

I assume they found me by stumbling on my 2005 blog posts on the topic (part 1 and the very brief part 2), but I’m not quite sure of the path they took to find the posts since, unlike some Google searches, I don’t show up as one of the top results for “double eyelid surgery” or “Asian blepharoplasty.”

In any case, while Montel is one of the more respectable daytime talk shows, it sounds like I would basically be going on the show to tell this woman that I think what she’s already done to herself is wrong. And to be honest, while I am against this desire among some Asian people to try to, as the folks at Montel say, “erase their race” and look more westernized, this desire to deny one’s own heritage, and (for the most part) purely elective plastic surgery in general, at the end of the day, like most things, I don’t feel so strongly about it that I expect other people to replace their own judgement and choices with mine. While I may not make the same choices, your body is yours and, as long as you’re not hurting anyone else, you are free to do with it as you wish. If you think double eyelid surgery or breast implants or liposuction will make you happy and you really want to do it, you should do it.

So, given all that, one of the things I’m really against is staged conflict (I have enough problems without having to create drama) and that is exactly what most daytime talk shows and going on Montel would be. Sorry America, I won’t be launching my talk show career just yet.

Thanks to everyone who wished me a happy birthday on Friday, including my co-workers who called me during my usual work-at-home-Friday to sing “Happy Birthday.” I turned 28 on the 28th!

Unfortunately, I spent Friday evening, into the wee hours, at the ER and then most of the afternoon and into the late evening on Saturday again at the ER. No, it wasn’t a “drinking related emergency” or any such fun– I had been suffering through five days of an excruciating headache and eventually ended up in the ER. The photo here shows the TWO IVs I ended up having put in on Saturday after they failed THREE times to get an IV in, finally got one in (the one in my hand) and then realized they needed to put a larger needle in higher for the contrast scan.

In any case, a total of fourteen hours later, I’m sick of the ER, but finally pain free and everything looks okay. (If you’re going to the ER and you have the chance, bring a book– you’re going to be waiting.) Thanks to the ER staff who, although they couldn’t get my scans to happen faster (who am I to trump a trauma?), were very nice and took care of me well.

phreequeshow

Fascinating and, in many ways, inspiring. (You try to dress yourself, eat or any number of things without any arms or legs.)